Mobile Broadband Information

Mobile broadband allows you to connect to the internet when you’re on the go and out of your office or home. To get mobile broadband on your computer or laptop you usually need a USB ‘dongle’. A dongle has a SIM card inside it just like a mobile phone and allows you to connect to the internet through a 3G network connection. Many mobile broadband deals come with a free dongle included.

In the simplest terms, a data allowance is a limit on how much information you’re allowed to receive through your connection in a given time. Another way to express this is that a data allowance is a limit on how much you can ‘use the internet’ through your connection.

Data is generally measured in kilobytes (kB), megabytes (MB) and gigabytes (GB). A megabyte is 1,000 kilobytes, and a gigabyte is 1,000 megabytes, or 1,000,000 kilobytes. Data allowances vary greatly in range from a few hundred megabytes to tens of gigabytes. To put this into some context, refer to the table below which shows the data ‘cost’ of some common internet activities.

Estimated data cost

How many can you get with…

100 MB

500 MB

1 GB

10 GB

Basic plain text email

25 KB each

4,000

20,000

40,000

400,000

Email with a photo or document attached

1 MB each

100

500

1,000

10,000

Average, mainly text webpage

200 KB each

500

2,500

5,000

50,000

Streaming music

1 MB per minute

100

500

1,000

10,000

Streaming average quality video

4 MB per minute

25

125

250

2,500

As can be seen from the table, multimedia activities like streaming music and video use the most data, so if you’re planning on using these services extensively you should select a plan with a higher data allowance.